Monday, April 7, 2014

Angus Macpherson is Police & Crime Commissioner for
Wiltshire Police.He recently told a
business breakfast meeting that the police were now working as a region, taking
in Gloucestershire, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall,
but, he added, “We will not lose
Wiltshire Police – neighbourhood members of the police, working and living in
local communities.It will be a
collaboration of services, but based in Wiltshire.”He said that 29 people had been taken out of
the management structure by co-operating on a regional basis.

Regional co-operation over policing was only to be
expected.The fire service already has a
control room network in place that is shared between four of the brigades
serving southern and central Wessex, stretching
from Plymouth to Aldershot.The ambulance service, run for the past 40
years as part of a centralised NHS and therefore immune from democratic local
input, has been almost wholly regionalised.

The paradox for the Coalition is that they want to save
money but don’t want to admit that one way to do this is to share certain
services on a regional basis.This
service-sharing is not widely publicised, because it undermines the repeated claims
that England
doesn’t need regionalism.The risk is
that England
goes on pragmatically building a regional tier of administration while
dogmatically rejecting a regional tier of government.In other words, that the regional tier goes
on being managerialist instead of democratic, that it goes on existing outside
formal, accountable structures.It would
be better if everyone owned up; then we could start putting in place
arrangements to make regions like Wessex a political reality and not
just a series of deals in the shadows.

Modern local government was created to join up and make sense of a host of overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions; regional government is needed to do the same at the wider scale.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Aye or nae, Scotland’s
debate over its future is laying bare the fundamental structure of the UK in ways that
no academic study could have begun to contemplate.There’s nothing like demanding answers to
questions that were always thought too fanciful to ask but have suddenly become
part of an urgent reality.

We know what the SNP’s vision is for Scotland.The rest of the UK is left looking rather smug in
that there is no widely shared vision for how it might be changed for the
better.Is it really that perfect?Shouldn’t the UK
minus Scotland
be thinking harder about its future?And
what if the ‘No’ camp wins?There is no
consensus over what that means, just a vague expectation of some sort of
devo-max to calm everyone down again.Or
maybe not.Certainly the vacuum is one
that benefits the separatist cause, highlighting it as dynamic and aligned with
the next chapter of history.

Advocates of small-State nationalism in Europe
have come up with a variety of ways to describe their goal, such as ‘internal
enlargement’ of the EU.At a seminar
held this week at the European Parliament, Dr Alan Sandry of Swansea University
came up with another:

“We will see what will
happen in the next ten years, it’s as if a new Berlin wall is coming down. New states are emerging and Europe
should prepare for that reality. In the UK
federalism is gradually being discussed as a topic, but that topic is over,
it's 15 years too late.”

Indeed.Did the
opportunity for a federal Britain
come and go without us even noticing?Probably
not, since there was always going to be a contradiction between federalism –
everyone moving forward at the same speed – and the reality of a multi-speed Britain.Anyone with a sense of history should have
spotted that even at the beginning of the current process we were well beyond
the beginning, since most of Ireland
left decades ago, an event long obliterated from political and media
memory.Equally the end – an independent
England with the last of its
empire cast off – is not the end either, since it raises the question of what
kind of England
that can be.Centralist – more of the
same – or regionalist – radically empowering communities throughout the
land?A federal Britain is dead: long live a federal England?

It’s not just the timing that was wrong.The English question is routinely
under-estimated because it lurks far below the surface.No-one much cares politically for England, as England,
if it can dominate the whole UK,
but start to challenge the assumptions of the union and England
suddenly matters again.England is then revealed as the spanner in the
works that makes a federal Britain
impossible to sustain.Re-imagine the UK as a federation of four or five nations and England’s
vastly greater size dooms the project to fail.Attempt to equalise the constituent parts by replacing England with
regions and the ship of state will sink somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis.

On the one side there is the national problem: that denying England any
expression of national identity but cherishing those of the other home nations
is simply unfair.Why should England disappear for Britain’s sake?On the other side there is the regional
problem: that regions can be built up, slowly but surely, from their historic
roots, but identities cannot be ordered into existence from Whitehall to match the timetable for Celtic
devolution.Imposed boundaries, for impractical
areas, with empty names, will alienate even the staunchest supporters of a decentralised
England.

There’s a saying about the fall of Communism in eastern
Europe.In Poland
it took 10 years, in Hungary
it took 10 months, in East Germany
it took 10 weeks, in Czechoslovakia
it took 10 days.We should expect Berlin
Wall II to follow the same pattern, with the more confident small nations
leading the way for others whose identities have been more drastically eroded.But the Europe
of a Hundred Flags is composed as much of historic regions as of small nations
and we should expect them to follow too in due course.Not into formal independence, but into a
degree of self-government that allows them to interact with their small-nation
neighbours on terms of practical equality that do not require every question of
importance to be referred to London, Paris or Madrid.Some regions will lead the way; others will
follow once they see the benefits. Wessex has every reason to aspire to be near
the front.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

“Universal peace will
be impossible, so long as the present centralised states exist.We must desire their destruction in order
that, on the ruins of these forced unions organised from above by right of authority
and conquest, there may arise free unions organised from below by the free
federations of localities into provinces, of provinces into nations, and of
nations into the United States of Europe.”

Mikhail Bakunin: address to the Congress for Peace and Freedom,
Geneva, 1867

As previously discussed, we reject the idea that our shires
are in any way expendable in the regional interest.The English shires are the building blocks of
the English regions, just as they are themselves composed of towns and parishes
whose autonomy deserves to be respected and cherished.

From time to time, we find ourselves arguing against those
who demand that shire boundaries be disregarded in pursuit of more ‘sensible’
regional areas.We’re told that we’re
over-ambitious to include as Wessex
the east of Berkshire or the north of Gloucestershire.Such reasoning ignores the associations of the
word ‘shire’, with ‘share’ and ‘shear’, denoting a portioning of something
larger.A shire cannot have divided loyalties;
it cannot be partly in one region and partly in another yet retain its unity,
otherwise what is it a shire of?

This is not to say that shire boundaries cannot, and therefore
do not, change.History shows that they
do.Real subsidiarity must allow for whole
shires to change region or nation, and equally for their constituent towns and
parishes to change shire, if that is the local will.(Among other things,
this argues for the return of Berwick-upon-Tweed to Scotland,
it being the original county town of Berwickshire and quite attracted right now
by the thought of restored rule from Edinburgh.)

Those who today view themselves as living in occupied north
Berkshire, or who reject their supposed legislative transformation from
Hampshire hogs to Dorset dogs, may take
comfort in the restoration of the Cornish border that occurred on 1st April
1966.Professor W.G. Hoskins, in Devon, his
monumental history of his home county, set out the story down to 1954:

“The western boundary
of Devon has a curious history.If we begin at its southern end, we follow
the Tamar for half its length, to a point just north-east of Launceston.Here a great tongue of Devon, two or three
miles wide and seven miles long, thrusts deep into Cornwall; but three miles
farther upstream the river becomes the boundary again and continues (except for
negligible breaks) to within a few yards of its source near the north
coast.From this point a direct
four-mile line down a steep, wooded combe brings one westwards to the Atlantic
coast at Marsland Mouth.

The great tongue of
land of which we have spoken covers some nineteen square miles and consists of the
two large parishes of North Petherwin and
Werrington.These parishes have always
been included in the archdeaconry of Cornwall
for ecclesiastical purposes, but are still in Devon
for all other purposes.They were
already included in Devon in 1086 and as they were entirely owned by the
Devonshire monastic house of Tavistock it has been suggested that the abbot saw
to it, when the boundary was drawn, that the whole monastic endowment on both
sides of the Tamar was conveniently included in the one county.But until 1066, or shortly afterwards, this
large estate had been included in the Cornish hundred of Stratton and was a part
of the royal demesne which descended to Gytha, the wife of earl Godwin.Some time between 1066 and 1068, when Gytha
left England
for ever, she had transferred the estate to Tavistock abbey.There is evidence that it was still reckoned
to be in Cornwall as late as 1084, but by 1086, when Domesday Book was
compiled, the abbey had been deprived of it and it was included under Devon,
where it has remained ever since.

It is almost certain
that the Tamar had been the original boundary along its whole length, except
for the parish of Maker at its mouth, and that the transfer of these nineteen
square miles from Cornwall to Devon took place silently when Baldwin de
Brionne, sheriff of Devon, held the farm of Harold’s and Gytha’s lands in
Devon.As Werrington (the political name
of this territory) was Gytha’s only considerable Cornish estate, it too fell
under his administration.Such an
arrangement suited the sheriff of Devon financially, for he paid an inclusive
rent for the farm of the Devon lands and should have paid a further rent if
Werrington had been officially known to be in Cornwall; and since the Exon
Domesday returns were drawn up at Exeter under his supervision he had the
opportunity also to set the official seal upon a deliberate fraud of the
exchequer.The estate was therefore
described under Devon in the final Domesday return, and as recently as 1929 a
Cornish bill to restore the status quo of 1066 was defeated in a committee of
the House of Lords.”

Now we know that 37 years later the boundary was restored to
its proper place, with the consent of every council affected.It pays to take the long view.We act in the belief that England more generally can be the kind of place
where local boundaries are determined by what local folk agree upon and are not
something to be imposed by self-proclaimed experts in London.And what goes for local boundaries may also go for regional ones.If Cornwall can
get justice after some 900 years, then so too can Wessex.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Still, after all these years, we get comments to the effect
that regionalists don't understand the English love of the shires and
therefore the instinctive resistance that is provoked by regionalism.

It’s a straw man argument, based on what may have been said
by the Labour Party about phasing out county councils.We have always been clear that the shires of Wessex are part
of our heritage, to be carried forward into our future, and that their identity
needs to be not just protected but massively strengthened.In this, we go beyond what is promised by any
of the main London
parties, all of whom are content to see traditional identities eroded.We are particularly proud of our shires in Wessex,
which is where the whole idea started.Shires may have existed here as early as King Ine’s reign (688-726);
their names were familiar to Ælfred and as England
became a single kingdom during the 10th century they were rolled out
across Mercia and Northumbria. Not at the expense of regional government though, which survived until the Norman Conquest, when it was eliminated as too great a challenge to the tyrannical royal power we still experience in its modern, parliamentary form.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of a local
government reorganisation widely believed to have changed the boundaries of
many traditional shires, including all but two of those in Wessex.In fact, a Government statement made at the
time and published in The Times – and
reiterated since – claimed boldly that this was not the plan:

"The new county
boundaries are administrative areas, and will not alter the traditional
boundaries of counties, nor is it intended that the loyalties of people living
in them will change despite the different names adopted by the new
administrative counties.”

That isn’t what happened.We were robbed.Everything from
the maps on the television news to the names of local newspapers quickly fell
into line, and stayed that way.A number
of us were drawn to regionalism precisely because of the outrage we felt.Others long ago retreated into nostalgia,
deciding that arguments about optimum administration under modern conditions of
life were not for them.Others again
retreated into paranoia, deciding that Englishness had been singled out for
destruction by the Communists or the Eurocrats, despite all the evidence to the
contrary.We have always been the ones
to ask more searching questions.

Foremost among those questions is what alternatives were
considered.Could we not have kept the
counties and county boroughs as they were, and had some other means of dealing
with issues that spill across urban boundaries?We could, and that is progressively where we’ve all been heading since
the 1990s, when cities and larger towns like Bristol,
Plymouth, Bournemouth and Reading regained their civic
independence.But if disputes with their
neighbours are no longer referred to County Hall, where do they go?They go to London, or to its regional offices.They don’t go to the regional assemblies that
have often been mooted as part of any rational system of government but have
always been rejected.

They have been rejected largely through an unholy alliance
between the Town Hall and Whitehall, presenting
them as unnecessary interference in local affairs and an undermining of London’s responsibility
to rule for the benefit of the whole nation.(That would be quite funny if it weren’t so sick.)

Municipal leaders who go along with this will find
themselves supping with the devil.In always
favouring a weak rather than strong assembly – unelected rather than
democratic, advisory rather than executive, legislative or tax-gathering – they
fulfil their own prophecies.An assembly
with no actual services to deliver will inevitably try to intervene in those
run by others, because that is how it will interpret its co-ordinating
brief.Give it enough to do and it will
be delighted to leave local government alone, especially if subsidiarity is
enforced by making it dependent financially on the local councils themselves.

By opposing strong regionalism, local leaders hand power
instead to London, and via London to global financial elites.The only question then left for ‘normal’
politics to grapple with is whether that power is exercised via regional offices
and agencies at finger’s-length, the repeated Labour solution, or directly by
ministers and civil servants in London,
the solution currently favoured.

We would never argue that our cities and counties are lesser
lands, to be subjugated to the wider will of Wessex.What we want for them are the kinds of
constitutional guarantee that have always been unthinkable under a Westminster
Parliament that greedily guards its sovereignty.

In return, we invite them to consider what powers are beyond
them, but not beyond the capabilities of a Wessex Witan.Health, higher education, tourism, transport
and the utilities, the regional framework for sustainable agriculture, energy
and housing, crisis management, the research and strategic thinking needed to
get us through the 21st century.Scotland and Wales provide
some pointers, as do the practices of other European countries that are no
strangers to letting folk get on with deciding their own futures.Regionalism is no big ask.It just means the London regime getting out of the way.